511–520 of 591 posts
Nice and pithy on the importance of daily practice. The key is to not be competitive, set a time limit and focus only on the "doing" with no judgement.
This was exactly how we built OwnLocal before we quit our day jobs. In a sense, it was very easy because when you don't know how big the problem is, everything feels like progress. Now I see 40 barreling towards me and it's hard to just do a little bit every day. Because I have experience, I can form a much bigger picture of an idea in my head and it's hard to peel off a tiny bit and make that feel like a success. Th…
the industry may have changed too - in my early days I remember more fantastical failures where the whole website would be down for an evening or other tragic mistakes. As more and more ppl got involved and things started to be worth more and more money we were more or less forced to put in more safe guards as there is less tolerance for failure/mistakes. I think the trade off between speed and safety will always be…
Effectiveness of just showing up works wonderfully for fitness as well. How much ever unfit one is, just showing up for a long period of time changes oneself. All one has to do drag oneself to the class, day in and day out, and then universe takes over..
This works amazingly well with a home weightlifting gym. Even 15 minutes before a meeting on a busy day can be gold.
If you haven't read or listened to this book yet, I highly recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1] It's a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazin…
What's more surprising (I would say, crazy) is that anyone expects more. Nobody works at their top level for more than 2-3 hours a day. Maaaaaybe 3-4 tops. Doesn't mean you can't be productive for many more hours, but you are not gonna be able to work effectively on tasks that are anywhere near the limit of your ability. You just can't and nobody does it....not athletes, not artists, not writers, not philosophers, no…
Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities. Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long run. It’s much better to swap out some time waster activities like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce time spent on vices, but after the habit is establ…
If you really work hard at your day job you just don’t have enough energy at the end of the day if you have also a family to care about. It’s a great advice for when you are young, it’s pretty much useless when you value the time that you spend with the people that you love much more than any amount of money.
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It is also much safer to praise a dead artist. Famous alive writer might suddenly turn out to be big fan of some genocidal world leader, embarrassing everyone who loves his earlier work. Dead people are mostly safe from this, though not completely - some dirty laundry might surface years after death, forever tarnishing the image, but such occurrences are rather rare.
I get your point but I don’t think that’s historically been any concern for people. Just in the past decade or so, and only for some people.
Also, with artists, only after death you can have his 'complete' works, not having to worry about increasing supply of them, which would push the price down.
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Someone mentioned a book called War of Art [1] here on Hacker News which I went out to buy and read. The author, Steven Pressfield, describes it as some metaphorical "Muse" (God of Art) that helps inspire your imagination when you set aside some time to do work. I loved that line of thinking since work can't happen if you don't show up. It motivated me, as indie dev that works from home, to make a concerted effort to…
Steven Pressfield is an amazing writer. I think he's the one who wrote about the Spartans and how ridiculously tough they were. I encountered the book as a paperback left in a bin for soldiers to take and read during some dumb deployment. Not that one, but a small one to Poland. This was 2002.
This worked wonderfully for me when prepping for interviews the last time I searched for a job. I just committed to 3 months of doing the Leetcode monthly challenge at a minimum. Some days I did more, yes, but only when I felt like it. By the end of the experiment, I'd seen the majority of algorithms and data structures problem classes that I'd likely ever see in an actual interview. Just doing the daily practice was…
Effectiveness of just showing up works wonderfully for fitness as well. How much ever unfit one is, just showing up for a long period of time changes oneself. All one has to do drag oneself to the class, day in and day out, and then universe takes over..
Also learning a new language
This is without much immersion (due to lockdown then traveling), and the instruction is online, and I've been a lazy bum about additional study.
It's made me pretty optimistic about learning new languages in general, and I'm 50 so the brain isn't exactly a sponge anymore. More like a sieve.
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And this is the great thing about threaded comments — everyone who wants to follow the pedantic branch of conversation can do so without derailing the others (though this ideal is frequently thwarted by bad UX). Of course, it's nice when the pedants are self-aware, as is the case here, and acknowledge the pedantry of their tangent. Normalize polite pedantry!
I don't think it's pedantic though. If what makes your argument powerful is tying it back to a natural phenomenon, then it should be right, otherwise you're using a bad example.
But I don't think that's quite what was going on here.
munificent was using a metaphor in service of his plea, his encouragement, his advice that you really ought to consider making regular efforts at what you care about. To me, that feels a lot less technical and a lot more human than an argument does.
The difference between metaphors and examples might be that the important part of a metaphor is how it functions in context, how it adds to the metaphrand[1], and the important part of an example is how it functions out of context.
To give an example of metaphor: many Native American tribes besides the Lemhi Shoshone have stories that claim Sacagawea as one of their own. The stories—themselves metaphors for tribal values—are, of course, wrong, but they serve an important instructional purpose, nonetheless, transmitting values and custom in a narrative that inspires. In that case, it seems less important that the children of these tribes are hearing something factually incorrect, and more important that they are inspired by and identify with the story.
To give an example of example: if you're making an argument in court, you have to reference examples of past rulings that support your position. The strength of your argument depends completely on the validity of your examples, as they occurred outside the current context.
If you think I'm full of hot air, you're right, but anyway here is a list of famous authors explaining how fiction is truer than the truth itself: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/01/27/famous-authors-on-t...
Thanks for coming to my TEDxHN talk.
1) Julian Jaynes, in the beginning of "The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", does a lovely segment on how we only learn via metaphor, and in which he develops the terms metaphier (commonly, the metaphor itself) and metaphrand (the thing being described by the metaphor).